I posted something a while back about a Zinedine Zidane documentary. (Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait) This doc was slightly different in that there were no interviews, no clips, no commentary. All the filmmaker did was watch Zizou play. He set up a number of cameras around the pitch and all of them were trained on ZZ. Nobody else, just him.

It wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had been done. Douglas Gordon (the Zidane documentary maker) got the idea from a 1971 doc which used this technique:

“On September 12, 1970, Manchester United beat Coventry 2-0. It was not an important victory, but a record was preserved of the match that was unique in the history of film and television. Using eight 16mm cameras, Hellmuth Costard followed every move, over the course of the match’s ninety minutes, of the man in the red #11 jersey, the mercurial George Best over the complete course of a match against Coventry City. Made at the height of Best’s fame and tabloid notoriety, Costard’s film focuses insistently on Best—warming up, looking restless and bored, waiting tactically to unleash his genius—rather than the on-pitch action to arrive at a sublime and revealing rumination on celebrity and a tantalizing glimpse of the man behind the myth.”

Extra Time:

Another documentary – Over at Sport Is A TV Show (curated by @Fredorrarci) there’s 30 minute doc which originally aired in 1970. It was written and narrated by the great Hugh McIlvanney. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Seb Patrick, who runs Branch Of Science, a good place to visit if you like the above sort of thing.